Leaders: Chris Davis and Denis Burnham

Speech, along with its production and perception, are complex events that evade easy understanding, and together have drawn linguistics, physiologists, psychologists, acousticians, cognitive scientists, engineers, and many more to their service. Despite its complexity, machines can now augment, describe, model, and simulate aspects of speech, and its perception and production, albeit via very different means than those used by humans. From the vast array of areas of study in speech, this Priority Area focuses on three particular issues, though not to the exclusion of others that might arise.

The first concerns augmentation of speech perception - such devices as cochlear implants, hearing aids, and hearing technologies - and will bring together researchers in the biomechanics of hearing, signal processing, auditory and visual speech perception, and the perception and production of affect, pitch and prosody.

The second concerns the biometrics of speech and forensic speaker identification, emphasising the dynamic properties of the voice in the environment This encompasses multiple research areas - forensic speech science, physiology of speech production, acoustics, linguistics, speech pathology, and statistical modeling.

The third concerns the speech recognition science and technology, including both automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, and human information processing; and topics ranging from the construction and use of speech databases for machine learning, through to models of human speech acquisition. The area begs the joint involvement of engineers, psychologists, linguistics, phoneticians, speech scientists, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists.